The Greek Myths, Volume 1 Read Online Free PDF Page A

Other consonants have since been added to the Greek alphabet by Simonides of Samos, and Epicharmus of Sicily; and two vowels, long O and short E, by the priests of Apollo, so that his sacred lyre now has one vowel for each of its seven strings.
    c . Alpha was the first of the eighteen letters, because alphe means honour, and alphainein is to invent, and because the Alpheius is the most notable of rivers; moreover, Cadmus, though he changed the order of the letters, kept alpha in this place, because aleph , in the Phoenician tongue, means an ox, and because Boeotia is the land of oxen. 1
1 . Hyginus: Fabula 277; Isidore of Seville: Origins viii. 2. 84; Philostratus: Heroica x. 3; Pliny: Natural History vii. 57; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xix. 593; Plutarch: Symposiacs ix. 3.

    1 . The Greek alphabet was a simplification of the Cretan hieroglyphs. Scholars are now generally agreed that the first written alphabet developed in Egypt during the eighteenth century B . C . under Cretan influence; which corresponds with Aristides’s tradition, reported by Pliny, that an Egyptian called Menos (‘moon’) invented it ‘fifteen years before the reign of Phoroneus, King of Argos’.
    2 . There is evidence, however, that before the introduction of the modified Phoenician alphabet into Greece an alphabet had existed there as a religious secret held by the priestesses of the Moon – Io, or the Three Fates: that it was closely linked with the calendar, and that its letters were represented not by written characters, but by twigs cut from different trees typical of the year’s sequent months.
    3 . The ancient Irish alphabet, like that used by the Gallic druids of whom Caesar wrote, might not at first be written down, and all its letters were named after trees. It was called the Beth-luis-nion (‘birch-rowan-ash’) after its first three consonants; and its canon, which suggests a Phrygian provenience, corresponded with the Pelasgian and the Latin alphabets, namely thirteen consonants and five vowels. The original order was, A, B, L, N, O, F, S, H, U, D, T, C, E, M, G, Ng or Gn, R, I, which is likely also to have been the order used by Hermes. Irish ollaves made it into a deaf-and-dumb language, using finger-joints to represent the different letters, or one of verbal cyphers. Each consonant represented a twenty-eight-day month of a series of thirteen, beginning two days after the winter solstice; namely:
1
Dec. 24
B
birch, or wild olive
2
Jan. 21
L
rowan
3
Feb. 18
N
ash
4
March 18
F
alder, or cornel
5
April 15
S
willow; SS (Z), blackthorn
6
May 13
H
hawthorn, or wild pear
7
June 10
D
oak, or terebinth
8
July 8
T
holly, or prickly oak
9
Aug. 5
C
nut; CC (Q), apple, sorb or quince
10
Sept. 2
M
vine
11
Sept. 30
G
ivy
12
Oct. 28
Ng or Gn
reed, or guelder rose
13
Nov. 25
R
elder, or myrtle
    4 . About 400 B . C ., as the result of a religious revolution, the order was changed as follows to correspond with a new calendar system: B, L, F, S, N, H, D, T, C, Q, M, G, Ng, Z, R. This is the alphabet associated with Heracles Ogmius, or ‘Ogma Sunface’, as the earlier is with Phoroneus (see 132. 3 ).
    5 . Each vowel represented a quarterly station of the year: O (gorse) the Spring Equinox; U (heather) the Summer Solstice; E (poplar) the Autumn Equinox. A (fir, or palm) the birth-tree, and I (yew) the death-tree, shared the Winter Solstice between them. This order of trees is implicit in Greek and Latin myth and the sacral tradition of all Europe and, mutatis mutandis , Syria and Asia Minor. The goddess Carmenta (see 86. 2 and 132. 6 ) invented B and T as well as the vowels, because each of these calendar-consonants introduced one half of her year, as divided between the sacred king and his tanist.
    6 . Cranes were sacred to Hermes (see 17. 3 and 36. 2 ), protector of poets before Apollo usurped his power; and the earliest alphabetic characters were wedge-shaped. Palamedes (‘ancient intelligence’), with his sacred crane (Martial: Epigrams xiii.